As Good a Time As Ever: My Saudi Arabia Rant

In light of the on-going catastrophe in Yemen and recent headlines about the new King’s ‘reshuffle’ of his possible (ubiquitously male) successors it seems a good a time as ever for my Saudi Arabia rant. No feminist blog would be complete without this rant, but I have many more problems with the Saudi Arabia question than their abhorrent treatment of women. So here we go, buckle up, it’s a long one! Sometimes if you explain the Saudi Arabia situation out loud to someone, (much like the Guantanamo Bay situation or other ridiculous events throughout American history) you realise just how obscene and deeply hypocritical it really is! On the one hand the U.S. have destroyed entire states (Iraq, Libya, Vietnam and Chile to name but a small few) on the basis of autocratic, corrupt, anti-human rights, terrorist-funding regimes to defend their own economic interests and yet on the other hand they almost single-handedly prop up the most profitable and dangerous state in the world. Not least for their hideous abolition of women’s rights. Whilst they are bombing innocent civilians in Syria and Iraq against the evils of ISIL raping women and brutally murdering homosexuals, they are also financing the very same ‘enemy’ through Saudi Arabia whose treatment of women and homosexuals is not incomparable to that of ISIL. The United Nations headquarters New York, with its UN Women department whose work is seminal sits just a few hundred miles away from the Whitehouse where the government is slyly supporting the most oppressive regime for women in the world. Just think about that for a minute, the hypocrisy is baffling.

Of course, that is not to say that it is only the United States at fault here, the rest of the Western world seems to blindly and cowardly follow their lead in supporting Saudi Arabia. Recently, the new foreign minister in Sweden when announcing her feminist foreign policy denounced Saudi Arabia in a common-sense way just like the rest of the world should do. The backlash was awful and goes to show just how monopolised Saudi’s power in the world truly is. Many scholars and journalists alike do important research about the rise of the BRICS and their influence on the world stage when in reality, behind the taboo scenes, Saudi Arabia has the West on puppet strings. In my mind, it is sometimes easy to perhaps overly dogmatically conceive that should the West stand up to resource monopolies, capitalism and oppression of women and men alike much of the large international security threats could be countered. This is, for me, one of the most fundamental political incentives to invest in green energy. Aside from you know I’d like my grandchildren to live please.

From a gendered perspective, women cannot vote, be members of government, drive, swim or leave the house without a male chaperone. The Western world, where so much (clearly tokenistic) work focuses on gender equality supports a regime where women cannot vote. In 2015. Women therefore have no representation in formal politics and their lives are significantly more difficult and silenced than men’s. It is easy here to fall into the ‘white western feminism trap’ here, many Saudi Arabian women smear western feminism for actually making things worse for women: whilst they are prized in society, we are sexualised and ridiculed. Whilst this maybe true on the surface, at the end of the day in Saudi Arabia women treated like possessions, prized possessions, but possessions all the same. It is high time we stood up to this palpable hypocrisy and voted in favour of more ‘feminist foreign policies’ which would do this.

Next week: What would a Hilary Clinton administration look like for the Middle East?